In the electronics industry it has become common to manufacture an electrical device capable of use in plural respective modes. A mode may be selected by the installation or removal of an electrical shunt, closing or opening one or more switches, and so on. As one example, when multiple fixed disk drives (sometimes referred to as hard disks) are connected in daisy chain relation to a computer, each drive number can be set by the user installing an electrical shunt across a pair of pin contacts or terminals of each fixed disk drive. Another example for use of a shunt is in random access memory circuits used with computers. Such circuits often have the ability to alter the starting memory location address by the shunting of a respective pair of terminals or pin contacts associated with the circuit. Accordingly, a user may install a shunt to connect an appropriate pair of such terminals depending on the already existing amount of memory in the computer with which the new random access memory circuit is to be used.
Electrical shunt devices of the type to which the present invention relates typically are installed on a pair of contacts to provide an electrical interconnection thereof. Such contacts may take various forms. The detailed description below refers to one of the more preferred contact forms with which such shunts are employed, namely the male pin type of contact or terminal. It will be appreciated that various aspects of the invention may be employed to provide electrical shunt function with respect to other types of contacts. Such pin contacts typically are soldered into place in a plated through hole of a printed circuit board for mechanical support by the board and electrical connection with a circuit trace thereon. As another example, the pin contacts may be part of a header or other device or devices that carry a plurality of such pin contacts; and the header(s) or other devices may themselves be attached to a printed circuit board or other support structure, as, of course, is well known. It will be appreciated that although the present invention is described for use particularly with pin contacts, various features of the invention may be employed with other types of contacts to effect the desired shunting function.